1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an information display apparatus provided with a touch panel and, more specifically, to a technique of printing information displayed on a display screen of the information display apparatus.
2. Description of the Background Art
A white board having an optical image sensor and a printer has been widely used for distributing minutes of a conference with many attendants. In the conventional white board, contents of proceedings written by a marker or the like are read by scanning with an optical image sensor. The optical image sensor obtains the contents of proceedings as an image. After the end of the conference, the organizer, for example, of the conference has only to print the image using a printer, prepare necessary number of copies of the print and to hand out the copies.
It is desired that a printer to be attached to the white board has a small size. As compared with a typical printer printing an image on plain paper, a thermal printer forming an image on a thermo-sensitive paper generally has a smaller size. Therefore, it is desired to have a small thermal printer mounted on the white board.
The method of printing an image described above, however, takes much time and labor, as a thermo-sensitive paper degrades quickly. The conference organizer, for example, must copy the printout sheet of thermo-sensitive by a copy machine or the like. Further, there has been much trouble for providing a clean copy of the minutes obtained as an image using word processor software or the like and for computerizing the information of the minutes for storage.
In order to solve these problems, Japanese Patent Laying-Open No. 2000-56747 discloses an electronic conference system in which a user directly writes-in contents of proceedings on a large display with an electronic pen, and all pieces of information written by the pen are computerized. In this system, the input information is computerized utilizing a technique such as OCR (Optical Character Recognition). By this system, it becomes possible for the conference organizer to easily manage, distribute to related parties, and to easily edit or process the contents of proceedings after the end of conference.
The technique disclosed in Japanese Patent Laying-Open No. 2000-56747, however, is silent about a method of classifying the input information in accordance with the usage. Each of the input contents of proceedings may have different level of importance. Further, it may be necessary to confirm who wrote what item of the contents of proceedings after the end of conference, if a plurality of participants had written items. There may be a demand for classifying input pieces of information into a number of groups in accordance with the level of importance, writer or the like, and for printing and saving information of a group selected by the user.
In consideration of such problems, Patent Application Publication US2007/0057923 A1 proposes a technique of distinguishing writers of pieces of information written-in to the white board from each other using a pen having a function of identifying each of the participants of a conference. The pen has a fingerprint sensor, and identifies a writer who holds the pen. Further, in the system according to this laid-open application, a sub-layer is formed by using a particular shape item, and thereby inputs made by one writer can further be distinguished for storage and management.
According to the technique of Patent Application Publication US2007/0057923 A1, however, what is possible is only the identification of writers. Therefore, it is impossible to extract and print only the pieces of information of higher importance among the input pieces of information regardless of the writer and to hand-out the printout to related parties.
In other words, there may be a demand that among the pieces of input information, those of lower importance may be displayed on the display during the conference but need not be printed. In such a case, it is necessary to extract only the pieces of information worth printing, from the pieces of information displayed on the display. Patent Application Publication US2007/0057923 A1, however, is silent about such a problem.
Further, if identification by the fingerprint sensor should fail, even the identification of a writer would be impossible.